Spellcrash: The Star’s End System

Spellcrash is a gonzo Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting I’m building featuring dying gods, trapped demons, impossible worlds and the most bizarre monsters the game’s ever known. It’s built around the cursed star system of Star’s End, which unerringly draws the lost and insane to it like bees to nectar. Read the introductory post.

A map of the Star’s End system. Credit: Ken Newquist

Godfire (Star): The physical embodiment of an ancient — and now forgotten — god of justice. In a more conventional universe, the star would be a red giant. Its bulk sheds a crimson light across the Star’s End solar system.

Demonmaw (Black Hole): The prison of a terrible and evil demon from the dawn of the multiverse, the Demonmaw manifests as a black hole that greedily consumes the stellar flesh of Godfire.

Crystal Vault (Terrestrial Planet): The innermost planet is in the system is made entirely of crystal. It’s inhabited by creatures aligned with the Elemental Plane of Earth or whose structures are silicon or crystalline-based. The Vault contains various magic-infused chambers containing relics of great power and protected by strange traps and stranger magic. The extreme heat and brilliant light of Godsfire permeate the labyrinthine world. That, coupled with the hard vacuum found in every corridor, chamber, and canyon, makes exploring the world exceedingly difficult to survive on, let alone plunder.

Titandeath (Gas Giant Planet): The second planet in Star’s End and one of two gas giants in the system. Titansdeath is orbited by 27 moons including three habitable (if not hospitable) worlds: Hellheart, Terminus, and Triton’s Sorrow. Titandeath is the place where comets, asteroids, and spelljammers die, drawn in by the gas giant’s gravity and smashed against its atmosphere.

Hellheart (Moon): A barely habitable world dominated by volcanos and populated by creatures who thrive in heat. Desperate adventurers come here seeking a rumor portal to hHell, a supposition backed up by the presence of devils on the moon.

Terminus (Moon): The most habitable world in the system for terrestrial creatures is this moon of Titandeath. A quirk of orbital mechanics sends some spelljammers crashing down onto this world instead of into the unforgiving storms of Titansdeath. Terminus is the default campaign world for Spellcrash.

Triton’s Sorrow (Moon): A water world ravaged by frequent storms and tidal waves caused by the nearby planet of Titansdeath and its companion moons.

The Garden (Gas Giant Planet): The third planet in Star’s End and the second of its two gas giants teams with massive airborne life. It has 14 moons, with two of them large and stable enough to support life (or mimicries of it). One of the worlds in its menagerie is unlike the others: a constructed world broken by a long-ago disaster.

Firevine (Moon): A moon of the Garden, Firevine is continuously remade by volcanic activity. Rivers of lava flow across its surface, making it inhospitable to all but the most resilient fire creatures. A portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire is believed to fuel the moon’s destruction … but the tales say it resides at the moon’s core, making it unreachable to all but the most powerful mortals.

Deathgrasp (Moon): Once overrun with life, the second moon of the Garden now holds a horde of undead. The moon is a tomb filled with the ruins of an ancient spelljamming civilization … perhaps the same one that gave rise to the Star’s End curse. The undead here constantly seek to escape their gray, cloud-shrouded world, sending spelljammers crewed by skeletal undead to raid other worlds. Something — many think it is the living spirit of the Garden – opposes them with space-borne behemoths.

Riftfell (Construct): In ages past, Riftfell was a hollow world with a miniature sun illuminating its habitable interior. A catastrophe shattered the moon’s exterior shell, opening a rift hundreds of miles long that runs from pole to pole. The interior sun is now dead leaving the ruins of the various cities on Riftfell’s inner surface in perpetual darkness. A feeble atmosphere, barely breathable, somehow rem

The Shatter Band (Asteroid Belt): A dense asteroid belt packed with rocks, ice, and debris. It is the first danger that spelljammers must face when being drawn into this system.

Stone Dog (Terrestrial Planet): A small rocky planet populated by stone constructs, Stone Dog serves as one of the arcane shepherd planets of the Shatter Belt. Magic radiating from this world appears to force the band to maintain its shape. It is an airless voice.

Frostmire (Terrestrial Planet): The farthest planetary body in the system maintains a breathable, if extremely cold, atmosphere and thus, a hardy and resilient population of sentiments. Cryovolcanos fueled by an unknown process spew ice into the atmosphere, giving rise to massive snowfalls and a perpetual winter. Unsurprisingly, cold-loving creatures such as frost giants and remorhaz love this world.

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